(VII of Swords / X of Cups)
Inhabit the in-between spaces, the borderlands. Step outside of the
center and become-animal. Experience the Other as an extension of
yourself. Take control of your powers and cause disruptions, form new
alliances. Make magic. Make love. Smash the State.
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(From Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus, "Memories of a Sorcerer II"):
...There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a
politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither
those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they
express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited,
in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups
all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If
becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters arounsed
in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at
its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central
institutions that have established themselves or seek to become
established...
...The politics of becoming-animal remains, of
course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies,
have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce
them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have
always appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that
strictly limit the becoming of the warrior. The Church has always burned
sorcerers, or reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a
series of saints who only remaining relation to animals is strangely
familiar, domestic. Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance
gnawing at them, in order to regulate alliances among themselves as
they see fit. We have seen sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the
cause of despotism, create the countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to
the side of the family and descent. But this spells the death of the
sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We have seen becoming spawn
nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in Henry Miller's damnation
("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an animal, a dog for
example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to time") or
Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you
throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand").
Invert Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the
traveling scholar? A mere poodle?
AND ALSO!
(From Tiqqun's "Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl")
...The stranglehold of Spectacle over the public expression of desires,
the biopolitical monopoly on all medical power-knowledge, the restrains
place on all deviance by an army ever better equipped with
psychiatrists, coaches, and other benevolent "facilitators," the
aesthetico-police booking of each individual according to her/his
biological determinations, the ever more imperative and detailed
surveillance of behavior, the proscription by common accord against
"violence," all this enters into the anthropological project, or rather
the anthropotechnical project of Empire. It is a matter of profiling
citizens...
...The vanquished in this war are not so much
citizens as those who, denying its reality, have capitulated from the
outset: what THEY allow the vanquished, in the guise of "existence," is
now nothing by a lifelong struggle to render oneself compatible with
Empire. But for the others, for us, every gesture, every desire, every
affect encounters, at some distance, the need to annihilate Empire and
its citizens. A question of letting passions breath in their fullness.
